LIKE THE WORLD Economic Forum (WEF), the Global Summit for Women includes participants from the government, business and NGO sectors. But unlike the WEF and other major global economic and political summits, the majority of the participants are not men.

“We decided that instead of waiting to be invited to these other meetings, we were going to create our own,” says Irene Natividad, founder and president of the Summit, which bills itself as “Davos for Women.”

Nine hundred female leaders from 88 nations convened in Cairo last month for the annual Global Summit for Women, where they discussed issues and exchanged best practices that aim to advance the economic status of women worldwide.

“Putting together this kind of gathering every year is not an easy task, but it’s worth it. We are a privately driven, non-profit organization and I’m proud to say that our summit has now become the international event for women to go to,” says Natividad. “The Summit, now in its sixteenth year, is primarily focused on how we can accelerate women’s economic status in every country of the world, with a big emphasis on entrepreneurship, the major economic activity in which women are now making headway.”

Natividad, an American born in the Philippines, has previously served as chair of the National Commission on Working Women in the United States and president of the National Women’s Political Caucus, a bi-partisan entity that trains and supports women running for public office in the United States.

“In the US, 44.1 percent of privately owned firms are now owned by women, and that is a significant increase just within the last decade,” she says. “Women who own businesses now hire more employees than the 500 largest companies in the US combined and they generate $2.3 trillion in revenues each year.”

Natividad claims that in developing economies, where micro-enterprise has been the main engine of growth, women’s contributions are just as significant: “Eighty percent of micro-entrepreneurs worldwide are women. They have been proven to be a better credit risks then men, so much so that development now seems to hinge on women’s economic activities. In countries where women are not as gainfully employed, they are finding that GDP is suffering. In Japan, the department of labor actually quantified how much the country was losing by not having women employed at parity with men. Now, they are starting to look into various childcare schemes, so that they may open up more opportunities for women.”

This year’s summit opened with a market profile on Arab women based on the most recent UNDP report. Natividad also commissioned a special video featuring five Arab businesswomen, including Egypt’s Farida and Yasmine Khamis, the young executives running Oriental Weavers Carpet Company, one of the largest firms of its kind in the world.

“We wanted to let the women coming from other parts of the world know that Arab women are running major things,” says Natividad. “This is my fifth time in Cairo in eight months. In the course of that time I have met some unbelievably talented businesswomen. But if you are in Europe, Australia or the US, the words ‘Arab’ and ‘businesswomen’ are generally not two words you put together. We wanted to really dispel the stereotype of the shrouded figure that doesn’t play a role in public life.”

Working closely with Egypt’s National Council for Women, Natividad showcased female talent in Egypt by inviting Egyptian speakers to every session. Panelists included CIB Vice-Chairman Sahar El-Sallab, economist Dr. Heba Handoussa, Chairman of Unilever Mashrek Hosna Rachid and President of Rada Research Loula Zaklama.

According to Natividad, the majority of the sessions dealt with practical matters. “We are not here simply to whine. We know there are problems and we are here to exchange solutions to these problems.”

Sessions included discussions on how to grow a business, develop your brand, gain access to financing, negotiate for yourself and your business, move into the corporate boardroom, improve communications skills and expand micro-enterprise.

“We also made sure that we addressed the problem of balancing work and family, because no matter what country it is you come from, that is the basic problem of women,” says Natividad. “They can be wage earners bringing in income to the family but they are still expected to make dinner, arrange for health care for their children and tend to their husbands. It doesn’t matter if you are American, German, Egyptian or African: It’s a problem because women are still expected to be the primary caretakers on top of being business owners or wage earners.”

Among those attending the Cairo summit was Henrietta Fore, America’s undersecretary of state for management. “Women teaching and mentoring other women in professional life is very important,” Fore says. “It is very exciting for us to be here. We learn so much from women who are working in other countries. You have to really reach out broadly because there is something that you can learn from everyone,” says Fore.

Also present were 45 ministers from various countries, the vice-president of Vietnam and a pack of entrepreneurs, CEOs and female executives from major multinationals including Microsoft, IBM and Cisco. The US had the largest national delegation, followed by Vietnam and South Africa.

But the largest delegation of any kind, though, came from a company, not a country: Microsoft sent 117 of its up-and-coming women from 32 countries, including two corporate vice presidents and the head of MSN Germany.

“We are proud to be one of the sponsors of this summit. We have been doing this for several years now. We were in Korea and in Mexico last year, but with 117 participants we have blown away our numbers from last year, when we were also the largest delegation with 88 women,” says Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector organization. “We really see power in coming together to network.”

According to Elliott, 25 percent of Microsoft’s employees are women, a figure about on par with the average in her industry. “As IT developers, we are restricted by the pipeline of women IT developers coming out of universities. There has been at least an 80 percent decrease in women who graduate with computer science degrees since the numbers peaked in the early 1980s. Between 2000 and 2004 alone, there was a 60 percent decrease in [women earning] IT-related degrees in the US,” Elliott says.

“We find that we are losing the girls early with math and science in middle and high school. The interest is dropping off precipitously, and we don’t know why that is. In a survey that was conducted in the UK, women said that they were uninterested in the IT field mainly because of work-life issues.”

When Elliott travels to Microsoft branches around the world, she usually holds an informal round table with the corporation’s local female employees to get a sense of what’s on their minds. She claims that whether the discussion lasts five minutes or five hours, they always come back to the issue of balance.

Both the balance of work-life issues and access to finance — whether in the form of large lines of credit from banks or small sums of money to start a micro-business — were major issues at the summit.

“We must also keep in mind that 70 percent of the poor around the world are rural women, and they are not thinking about balance,” says Elliott. “When you think about 92 percent of the water on this planet being undrinkable and those poor rural women spending most of their day hauling water, I don’t think they are thinking about how much time they are spending with their husbands and families. They are worried about keeping their families fed and staying warm.

“We have to train and empower the millions of unemployed, un-empowered, underserved women around the world so that they too can have a voice. I think that conferences like these raise awareness and help us to come up with new ideas that we can implement around the world. They encourage us to be champions.”  et